treason and blasphemous libel, and Shelley feared he might be put in the
pillory himself. Mary's sister Fanny, to whom he was attached, killed
herself in October; Harriet's suicide followed in December; and in the
same winter the Westbrooks began to prepare their case for the Chancery
suit, which ended in the permanent removal of Harriet's children from
his custody, on the grounds that his immoral conduct and opinions
unfitted him to be their guardian. His health, too, seems to have been
bad, though it is hard to know precisely how bad. He was liable to
hallucinations of all kinds; the line between imagination and reality,
which ordinary people draw quite definitely, seems scarcely to have
existed for him. There are many stories as to which it is disputed
how far, if at all, reality is mixed with dream, as in the case of the
murderous assault he believed to have been made on him one night of wind
and rain in Wales; of the veiled lady who offered to join her life
to his; of the Englishman who, hearing him ask for letters in the
post-office at Pisa or Florence, exclaimed, "What, are you that damned
atheist Shelley?" and felled him to the ground. Often he would go half
frantic with delusions--as that his father and uncle were plotting to
shut him up in a madhouse, and that his boy William would be snatched
from him by the law. Ghosts were more familiar to him than flesh and
blood. Convinced that he was wasting with a fatal disease, he would
often make his certainty of early death the pretext for abandoning some
ill-considered scheme; but there is probably much exaggeration in the
spasms and the consumptive symptoms which figure so excitedly in his
letters. Hogg relates how he once plagued himself and his friends by
believing that he had elephantiasis, and says that he was really very
healthy The truth seems to be that his constitution was naturally
strong, though weakened from time to time by neurotic conditions,
in which mental pain brought on much physical pain, and by irregular
infrequent, and scanty meals.

In February 1817 he settled at Marlow with Mary and Claire. Claire, as
a result of her intrigue with Byron--of which the fruit was a daughter,
Allegra, born in January--was now a permanent charge on his affectionate
generosity. It seemed that their wanderings were at last over. At Marlow
he busied himself with politics and philanthropy, and wrote 'The Revolt
of Islam'. But, partly because the climate was unsuitable,